Eartha Kitt

The Roar Born in the Cotton Fields

Orson Welles described her as the most exciting woman in the world. But Eartha Kitt was in reality a survivor who carried the weight of a childhood of deprivation in the cotton fields of South Carolina. She was born in 1927 as the result of a rape and spent her early years working the land until she managed to escape to New York.

Before turning twenty, she was already dancing for Katherine Dunham's company. That technical training allowed her to travel to Paris and discover that her voice had a magnetism no one yet knew how to classify. There she learned to sing in seven languages and to use the purring vocal style that became her trademark in Europe's most exclusive nightclubs.

That provocative Christmas song titled Santa Baby brought her steady income for decades and put her on the radar of major Hollywood studios in the mid-1950s. But Kitt wasn't just after easy commercial success. She wanted total control over her image in an industry that only offered stereotyped roles to Black actresses.

And the audience responded with a mix of fascination and fear.

The Purr-fect Claws of Racism

In 1967, she accepted the role of Catwoman in the television series The Batman. It was a bold move, since she was replacing a white actress at a time when showing a Black woman with such sexual power on screen was a direct challenge to the system. She didn't simply play the character. Kitt devoured it with a physicality that is still studied in acting schools today.

But her career came to a sudden halt during a luncheon at the White House in 1968. Kitt criticized the Vietnam War in front of the First Lady with a bluntness that no one in Washington was willing to tolerate. The CIA drew up a defamatory report about her, and her U.S. contracts vanished overnight on government orders.

She had to go into professional exile.

She spent nearly a decade working in Europe and Asia to pay the bills while the FBI kept tabs on her movements from afar. She never apologized for her words. So she had to wait until 1978 for Broadway to bring her back with the musical Timbuktu!, where she proved her strength was still intact despite the official ban.

The Return of the Perfect Villain

During the nineties, her career enjoyed a second youth thanks to her ability to laugh at her own image as an unapproachable diva. In 1992, she appeared in the film Boomerang alongside Eddie Murphy. But it was her voice work that connected her with new generations of viewers who were unaware of her political past.

In 2000, she voiced Yzma in the animated film The Emperor's New Groove. She won three Emmy Awards for this role and made her voice known to millions of kids who had never heard her jazz records. Kitt kept working until her body said enough at her home in Connecticut.

She died of colon cancer on December 25, 2008. Her estate was valued at over four million dollars after years on the U.S. government's blacklist.